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The Mystery of Self-Deceiving by Daniel Dyke was first published in 1614. It was republished numerous times in the next twenty years and was among the books Elder William Brewster brought with him to America on the Mayflower in 1620. It is perhaps the greatest work on self-deception, sin, and the human heart ever written. “This frightening book assumes that in order to be able to deal with man’s religious difficulty one must first understand it fully. It then proceeds to dissect the human heart fibre by fibre and cell by cell. No corner is left unexplored, no crevice forgotten, no raw nerve kept mercifully unexposed. Sin’s devious subterfuges and disguises are discovered and labeled, No corner is left unexplored, no crevice forgotten, no raw nerve kept mercifully unexposed. Sin’s devious subterfuges and disguises are discovered and labeled, their specific causes and results catalogued. Various deceits and follies of man are examined minutely both with regard to omission and commission. Dyke’s analyses are perhaps the most acute which can be found among the various diagnosticians of the spiritual life...Protestantism has produced no other treatise in which the psychology of sin was more exhaustively treated than in Dyke’s Mystery of Self-Deceiving.” Some of the thirty-one chapters in this book are: Of the Greatness of the Heart’s Deceitfulness, and of the Cause of her Deceitfulness; Of the Unsearchableness of the Heart, and of Six Notes to Discover it by; Of the Deceit of the Heart in translating the Sin from ourselves upon some other Cause; Of the Deceit whereby we Judge ourselves not to be so Evil, as indeed we are; Of the Deceits of three several Sorts of men, the Rich Worldling, the Civil Justiciary, the Loose Libertine; Of the Deceits of the Temporary Believer’s Faith and Feelings; and Of the deceits of the Temporary in the outward Practice of Repentance. Thirty-one chapters newly typeset. 324 pp. Clothbound.
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Nehemiah Rogers